


Howard Stark, ‘Dr Reinstein’, and the supersoldier serum in the MCU

by Aegir



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Incredible Hulk (2008)
Genre: Gen, Meta, Super Soldier Serum, backstory speculation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-06
Updated: 2017-09-06
Packaged: 2018-06-09 07:03:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6894799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aegir/pseuds/Aegir
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Speculative essay which addresses the question of why Howard Stark was driving around with supersoldier serum in 1991, and finds that 'The Incredible Hulk' offers some possible answers and a whole lot more questions. </p><p>Also takes in what may have gone wrong with the Mark II Winter Soldiers, where the serum Ross dosed Emil Blonsky with came from, and why Tony Stark knew military secrets.  And who was 'Dr Reinstein' anyway?</p><p>Minor updates 06/09/2017</p>
            </blockquote>





	Howard Stark, ‘Dr Reinstein’, and the supersoldier serum in the MCU

**Author's Note:**

> So I've seen Civil War and came home and wrote a lot of meta about supersoldier serum. Here it is.  
> Updated 06/09/2017 to clarify some things about Bruce Banner and supersoldier serum research

_The Incredible Hulk_ is perhaps the least watched of the MCU movies, yet I’m sure the writers of _Civil War_ rewatched it very carefully, because much more aligns than just the presence of General Ross.  The film certainly sheds more light on exactly what Howard Stark was up to driving around with sachets of serum in his car boot back in 1991, even though it raises as many questions as answers in the end.

In _TIH_ we learn Ross has been trying to recreate the supersoldier serum.  Bruce Banner’s work on gamma radiation was related to that, although Bruce himself didn’t know it.  As Ross puts it:

“Banner's work was very early phase.  It wasn't even weapons application.  He thought he was working on radiation resistance.  I would never have told him what the project really was.  But he was so sure of what he was onto that he tested it on himself.”

Bruce does **not** have the serum.  I believe the idea he does most likely sprang from something Coulson says in _The Avengers_ , which is far more widely watched than _TIH_.  Coulson’s words to Steve are, “Banner thought gamma radiation might hold the key to unlocking Erskine’s original formula.” Coulson, however, did not take any part in the events of _TIH_ , so whatever information he has must be second hand at best. 

In fact, what Bruce did was to dose himself with what was intended to be a vaccine against radiation sickness, then intentionally test it by exposing himself to gamma radiation.  Instead of working as intended, Bruce’s formula caused his bloodsteam to internalise the gamma radiation.  It’s the radiation, rather than the vaccine, that causes him to become the Hulk. 

Ross evidently intended Bruce’s work to be a component in a new serum, but it was never meant to be more than a part of the package and, according to what Ross told Blonsky, Bruce himself had no idea that Ross’ ultimate aim was to recreate the serum.  Given that Bruce is adamantly against the idea of his Hulk condition being replicated in order to be weaponised, and also that Ross has no reason to lie to Blonsky on that particular point, this is likely to be true.  Coulson’s information, by contrast, may well be the result of a deliberate deception by Ross, who has every motive for shifting the blame for the Hulk disaster to Bruce in his official reports.  (From an external perspective it can be put down to Joss Whedon condensing and simplifying events for audiences who hadn’t seen _TIH_.)

When Ross talks about “weapons application” it's human weapons he means.  Bruce is running from Ross, not just because he doesn’t want to be locked up or killed, but because he doesn’t want Ross to be able to replicate what Bruce did in order to make himself living weapons.  Although I think it highly likely Ross encouraged Bruce to experiment on himself, he didn't see Bruce’s anti-radiation work as a potential weapon by itself until, in his own words "something went very wrong.  Or it went very right.”  Ross acknowledges he was “trying other things”, in addition to Bruce’s research, and one of those things was a “very promising” supersoldier serum. 

There is a character in _TIH_ who does receive the ‘promising’ serum – but it’s not Bruce: it’s Emil Blonsky.  Ross essentially dangles the serum in front of the aging Blonsky, who promptly takes the bait, asking to receive the serum in order to regain his youthful vitality.  Ross is seen entering a locked room which has sealed canisters, containing serum phials, labelled _Developer: Dr Reinstein_ , and extracting some for use on Blonsky. 

Before the serum is administered by medics Ross tells Blonsky, “I need you sharp out there and disciplined.  First sign of any side-effect we stop and you’re off team until you straighten out.”  So Ross knows there may be mental side-effects.   Obviously there has been a history of problems with the Reinstein serum, but Ross is unwilling to give up on trying to make it work.

Blonsky’s enhancement works immediately, but he also starts to show increased aggression and recklessness.  After he suffers multiple injuries at the hands of the Hulk and heals extraordinarily rapidly – more rapidly I think than we have ever seen Steve Rogers heal – Ross gives him a top up, and the symptoms get a lot worse.  At this point Blonsky also starts to show signs of physical mutation, with bony ridges appearing down his spine.  Where this would have lead we don’t entirely know, because the now thoroughly unhinged Blonsky forces another character to dose him up with Bruce Banner’s gamma radiation infused blood, which promptly reacts with the serum to transform him into the Hulk-sized Abomination. 

What does all this have to do with Howard Stark?  Well at the end of the film, Tony Stark shows up for a cameo and tells Ross “that supersoldier programme was put on ice for a reason.”  So Tony knows about both the programme and the side effects.  How?  It’s not, on the face of it, his kind of project, he even says himself that he prefers hardware.  But it is Howard Stark’s kind of project.  Howard worked with Erskine on the original supersoldier project.  If the military wanted to try and recreate the serum then Howard (before his death) would be the first person they would call.

It’s true that Ross implied to Blonsky that the supersoldier programme had been inactive between WW2 and his own recent decision to reactivate, and that the Reinstein serum was developed under his supervision.  However Ross isn’t the most reliable person, and he doesn’t want Blonsky asking why the programme was dormant, so that doesn’t rule out a period of experimentation involving a post-WW2 Howard Stark that was abandoned because of ‘side-effects’.

Now in _Civil War_ we have Howard saying he needs to drop by the Pentagon before driving off with a bunch of supersoldier serum samples in his boot.  The obvious implication is Howard was developing the serum for the US military.  And we’ve seen the military in possession of a supersoldier serum sometime later.  On the Occam’s razor principle, that’s at once grounds for thinking Howard’s serum and the ‘Reinstein’ serum are the same.

There is more though.  Karpov’s Mark II supersoldiers react with the same extreme and uncontrolled aggression that Blonsky showed.  The effects may have been even worse than Bucky is aware of, since it seems that despite being stronger than the original Winter Soldier, and despite already being part of a HYDRA death squad, implying they wouldn’t need the mindcontrol techniques and extensive wiping inflicted on Bucky, HYDRA reverted to relying on their original supersoldier instead of deploying the Mark IIs.  By implication the Mark II project was a failure, although one there may still have been hope of fixing since they were left in cyrofreeze rather than killed.  Parallels again with the ‘Reinstein’ project, which Tony assures us was shut down for a reason.  After what happened with Blonsky it’s not hard to deduce what the reason was.

Now it’s an open question how much of the reaction shown by Blonsky and the Mark IIs was simply a case of the serum enhancing traits that were already there: “Good becomes great, bad becomes worse”.  The Mark IIs were HYDRA killers, and Blonsky was already aggressive, ruthless and obsessed with the fight.  Even Blonsky’s physical mutation can be paralleled by what happen to Red Skull.  Without more information on the US Army’s previous test subjects we cannot be sure whether the problem was with the serum, or the people it was given to.

In conclusion: it’s highly likely that Howard Stark helped develop the ‘Reinstein’ serum and died for it.  That still leaves a lot of questions however:

  1. _How did Howard recreate the serum?_ Evidently not from any blood samples of Steve’s, since we are told in _Agent Carter_ that the sample Peggy destroys is the last. We don’t know how, but Howard was a brilliant man and he worked closely with Erskine, so it’s not a stretch that he could recreate it.
  2. _Who was ‘Dr Reinstein’?_ According to Marvel wiki, in the comics ‘Reinstein’ is a codename used both by Abraham Erskine and by Dr Wilfrid Nagel, who also worked on producing supersoldier serum  Nagel was Erskine’s contemporary, but a much more corrupt character, heavily involved in unethical and deeply racist human experimentation.   I suspect that when _TIH_ was made, Reinstein was meant to be Nagel  – but probably nobody expected Howard Stark to become such an important character at that time.



One other MCU character who we know worked on the serum in the MCU and was employed by the US government is Arnim Zola.  Could MCU ‘Reinstein’ be Zola?  It’s not impossible, but Zola died in the 1970s, so for him to be working on a new serum with Howard in 1991 Howard would have to be aware Zola was still around in creepy computer form, which does not seem probable.   MCU ‘Reinstein’ seems more likely to be Howard himself under a code name.  Or it might be somebody else as yet unseen.  It might even be Erskine: the MCU ‘Reinstein’ serum certainly isn’t Erskine’s serum, since there were no more samples left of that after his murder, but if it was intended to be a recreation of his serum it might still have been named after him.

  1. _Why did HYDRA need to steal the serum?_ Bucky is living proof that Zola had cracked the formula, so why couldn’t he recreate it? (There is absolutely no doubt that MCU Karpov is HYDRA.  ‘Hail HYDRA’ are his final words.)  We can only guess, but one possibility is that Zola was unable to recreate the serum he used on Bucky because all his notes and test samples were destroyed when Steve burned down his lab while rescuing the 107 th.  Bucky must already have had some form of the serum after his first capture by HYDRA or he wouldn’t have survived the fall from the train.
  2. _Why did HYDRA go to the trouble of dispatching the Winter Soldier all the way from Siberia, instead of using a US based operative?_ We know they were already in SHIELD, it shouldn’t have been hard for a SHIELD agent to get to Howard, and the hit itself wasn’t terribly demanding. Obviously the main reason is ‘Because the plot demands it’, but HYDRA faction infighting could provide a plausible in canon explanation.  Karpov may have wanted the serum for his own HYDRA faction rather than the US based SHIELDRA.  And it may be that the failure of the Mark IIs resulted in his going down a long snake on the HYDRA board.  That Karpov is hiding out in the US suggests he may have ended up working for Alexander Pierce and escaped somehow after the collapse of Project Insight.
  3. _Why didn’t either Blonsky or the Mark II Winter Soldiers receive the Vita-Rays Steve Rogers did?_ This is uncertain, it may be that neither Ross nor Karpov had the necessary technology and they just hoped that the serum would work without. Ross might even have intended Bruce’s gamma radiation work to be a substitute for the Vita-Rays, but abandoned that line when Bruce’s work took an unexpected direction. It may or may not be relevant that Steve was the only serum recipient to grow several inches.
  4. _How did Tony Stark know about the ‘Reinstein’ project, when he didn’t know why his father was dropping by the Pentagon in the flashback?_ It could have happened in various ways.  Stark Industries involvement could have continued under Obadiah Stane after Howard’s death.  In fact if Howard’s serum and the ‘Reinstein’ serum are the same, then we must assume Stark Industries did continue working on the serum for a certain amount of time, since the military were able to obtain more samples. Alternatively Tony could have found out from old files or lab notes of Howard’s and followed them up out of curiosity, using his own ties to the military as a weapons supplier to find out what happened to the project.
  5. _Why didn't anyone guess the Starks' death was murder at the time?_ A government weaponry contractor and his wife are found dead in their car, and a top-secret experimental weapon is missing from the wreckage.  Murder seems an an obvious conclusion.  Someone at the Pentagon must have known Howard had the serum with him, because someone was expecting it.  The likely answer is that the Pentagon did deduce the crash was no accident.  But they couldn't openly follow it up, if they wanted to keep the reactivated supersoldier project a secret.  Whatever Tony knew about the project, we must assume he never found out the Pentagon was expecting a serum delivery on the day his parents died.  Does Ross know?  No telling, he might.  (Of course it was highly irresponsible of Howard to be transporting the stuff in his private car, but that's Starks for you)
  6. _Will any of this ever get addressed in canon?_ Pretty doubtful. The _Infinity War_ movies are going to be hugely busy, I doubt there’ll be time.  But we’ll always have fanfic.




End file.
